by Gary McMahon
And that wasn’t all that had altered.
The wall behind the mummified cadaver was seething. I strained my eyes, trying to make out what I was seeing in the dim light. At first I thought it was just the shadows again, boiling on the wall, but as I watched, the whole thing became clear. The wall had been turned into a mosaic. It was like something from a nightmare. Children’s body parts were attached to the brickwork, perhaps nailed or maybe glued in place. I saw arms, legs, torsos, heads, faces…and they were all writhing, caught up in some terrible dance.
I looked again at Katherine Moffat’s body, then back at the shifting wall of death. The movement stopped. It was just a blank wall again, with darkness billowing across it like a vast black sail. For a moment I thought the images inside the dead killer’s head had been released, and that’s what I had seen: her dreams, her hopes, her fantasies. I felt tainted, unclean. I could never unsee those images; they’d stained me forever.
Her dead mind had touched mine, and I doubted I’d ever recover.
“Before we get really busy, it’s time to tie up some loose ends.”
I moved my gaze back to Kyle. He was holding the gun out from his body.
“Please…” I felt weak, almost beaten. “My daughter…”
Kyle shook his head. “Loose ends, man.” He raised the gun, swung his arm around and pointed it at Pru’s head. Then he pulled the trigger. She didn’t even know what was happening until the bullet entered her brain. Her eyes were still focused on me; she was grinning. An arc of blood that looked black in the dim light shot from her head. Her knees buckled, her shoulders slumped, and she went down like deadweight. Calmly, without looking at me, he pointed the gun at the floor and shot Carole once. She didn’t even twitch. For all I knew, she was already dead and he was doing this for show.
Kyle walked away, moving off to the side. He was swallowed by darkness. Seconds later, before I had the chance to react, he emerged from the shadows carrying Jess. He set her down on the floor, gently, respectfully. He was still holding the gun. It was pointing at me.
Jess was unconscious. From what he’d told me, it sounded like he wanted her alive for his purposes. I had to believe that he hadn’t killed her, that there was still a chance I could save her.
She was still wearing her pajamas. There was a thick swathe of duct tape across her mouth. Her body had been floppy when he was carrying her; her muscles were loose and her limbs were rubbery. I stared at her, willing strength into her small, soft form.
I’d failed to notice while all this was happening, but the light was intensifying. There was a glow in the air; it was the same as when I’d started walking down the stairs into the cellar, as if fireflies had entered the room.
(Bright-dark)
I looked around to see where it was coming from. Kyle had noticed it, too. He looked less certain than he had only minutes before. A soft buzzing sound started up. It wasn’t coming from one place; it was coming from everywhere, from the air itself.
“What the fuck is this?”
I couldn’t answer him; I had no idea. But then, in a flash, I remembered what Jess had told me about the little girl in her room, and the way the box of books in the cellar had been a clumsy kind of warning. Then I knew exactly what this was…who it was. It was them. It was the Radiant Children.
They appeared in the corner of the room, but they didn’t look quite real. It was a clump of light, and it moved slowly, steadily, in the direction of Benjamin Kyle. He didn’t see it at first. He was looking at me, pointing the gun, as if I were the one causing this. Then, when he noticed my attention was not on him, he looked into the corner and saw them, too.
The clump of light was pulsing. It was glowing and making that soft buzzing noise. It sounded a lot like singing, but heard from a distance. The Radiant Children were chanting that same nursery rhyme I’d heard outside, the one about Little Miss Moffat…
As the wavering clot of bright darkness moved toward Kyle, it slowly broke apart, flowering into separate forms. As this happened, the individual images became clearer. First one, then two, then three children were walking or floating toward him. The three became six; six became twelve. Soon the room was filling up with the ethereal figures of dead children, each of them chanting that rhyme.
Kyle finally jerked into action. His finger twitched on the trigger, and he fired bullets at the glowing crowd of newcomers. They kept moving toward him at the same unhurried pace, beatific smiles on their pulsing, light-filled faces. The images had stopped clarifying, but I could make out eyes, noses, mouths…and they all seemed to be held together by a diffuse light that had no source in the real world, the world in which I was standing. I realized that this place—this killing room—was not a real place at all. That was how the police had missed it. The cellar they had entered was not the same as this one; this space existed solely in the imagination of Katherine Moffat, and somehow we’d been able to access it.
And now the Radiant Children had found their way here, and they were helping me.
They closed in on Benjamin Kyle, lighting up his terrified features for a moment, and then, as I watched in a fascinated kind of horror, his features began to melt. It happened quickly: one second he was starting to scream, the next the skin of his face was like molten wax. The bright darkness was acting like acid. It liquefied his flesh on the bone, dripping down onto his naked shoulders, setting off a biological chain reaction that stripped his torso down to the muscle, then to the bone.
Kyle raised his hands and started raking at his face with clawed fingers, pulling away the molten skin like lumps of congealed fat. He sank to his knees but the Radiant Children lifted him, bore him aloft, and stared to carry him away.
They took his thrashing body into a corner, and then their weird light went out.
I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the spot where they’d been, expecting to hear something—even if it was a distant scream. I was disappointed when all I heard was the silence they’d left behind.
Even then, immediately after the event, I began to doubt what I had seen. I didn’t believe in ghosts; the supernatural was not part of my mind-set. I knew I’d think about it again later and apply some kind of rationale that explained everything, but right now I had to go and help my daughter.
I moved quickly, rushing over to where she was lying and going down on my knees. Ignoring Pru’s body, I tore the duct tape off Jess’s mouth and started to rub her cheeks, her forehead. “Wake up, baby. Wake up…” She didn’t move. I felt for her pulse, and after a few panicked seconds I found it. The pulse was weak, but it was there. She was still alive.
Then, with her eyes still closed, she whispered something: “Bright-dark.”
It was all the evidence I needed that she was okay.
I picked her up and carried her in my arms, moving toward the stairs. The cellar was just a cellar; there was nothing else to fear. The lights flickered above me, but it was just a faulty connection. The ghosts had gone; the killers had been dealt with.
Behind me, I heard the delicate crinkling of cellophane.
I stopped, turned, and faced whatever was waiting for me in the shadows.
Katherine Moffat’s body was slowly, stiffly rising from the high-backed chair. She rose, and kept on standing, towering at the back of the cellar. If she’d been tall in life, she was colossal in death. Whatever remained of her fevered, nightmarish imagination was fuelling this display. The cellar walls seemed to flicker around us along with the rhythm of the lights, and it wasn’t an effect of the old, unstable wiring. This version of reality was breaking apart; she couldn’t hold it together for much longer.
Katherine Moffat lurched forward, her huge pumpkin head wobbling on the stalk of a neck. The carved eyes blinked; the slash of a mouth opened wide, wider…and a strange, heartbreaking sound came from the depth of her, like an ocean floor splitting up into pieces, or cave walls coming down inside an underground cavern. It was the sound of internal destruction: the death-kne
ll of the world. I still hear it now, in the worst of my nightmares, and I’ll probably hear it again at the second of my death.
I didn’t have long to act. It had to be now or never. If I didn’t exorcise this hungry demon, it would hang around forever, waiting for a chance to return and try again. I put Jess down on the floor, making sure she was in a comfortable position, and then I paused for a moment, clenching my fists, before running full tilt at that thing from the blackest dream, that monster from the longest night, that beast from the endless, shit-smelling sewers of the afterlife.
I hit her hard but she barely moved. Despite being dead for two years, she was solid, like a hanging cow carcass. I was aware of punching her; I threw wild combinations, lefts, rights, hooks, uppercuts. My fury was my weapon. Soon she began to falter. Her arms were around me, and she was squeezing me tight, but the sheer force and number of my blows were finally causing some damage.
She buckled, went down onto her knees. I heard the sound of bones cracking. When I looked down, I saw the wavering image of a skinny black drug dealer superimposed over her crumbling form. I kicked her in the chest, my foot sinking into the spongy, long-dead matter. She fell. I threw myself on top of her, and then started raining down blows onto that vile pumpkin head, surprised by its texture and solidity, and how it felt like I was slamming my fists into stone.
I counted the punches out loud:
“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.”
Then I started counting again:
“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.”
I don’t know how many times I counted to ten, but I knew I couldn’t stop until she was pulp, nothing but a wet stain on the concrete floor. After a while I didn’t even know who I was punching, the dead serial killer, the dead drug dealer, or myself. Perhaps I was trying to smash all three of us into oblivion.
I think I blacked out for a while.
Time lost all meaning.
When I glanced to the side, I saw Holly watching me from the corner of the room. She was smiling sadly and nodding her head. Whatever part she’d played in this from the depths of her coma, it was over.
The next thing I became aware of was a hand on my shoulder, a gentle pressure, someone turning me around with nothing more than a touch as soft and light as a butterfly’s wing. Jess had woken; she was standing behind me, her face bathed in a familiar diffuse light. Behind her stood the Radiant Children wrapped in their protective bright darkness, and they were all smiling, all nodding, too. I felt that each one was offering me their approval for what I had done.
The wicked witch was dead. The terror was over.
I had endured. I had overcome.
When I looked back at the thing on the floor, it was unrecognizable as a person. The cellophane was ripped apart, dark meat and thick juices had spilled out onto the floor, and the greasy remnants of the pumpkin head were smeared on my hands, the floor, my shirt…
I stared at my hands. They were torn and bleeding, the bones of my knuckles showing through the flesh from where I’d kept on punching the concrete floor even after the pumpkin had been turned into soup. I felt no pain; the adrenaline was making me fly.
“Daddy…” Her voice was that of an angel.
I stood, and Jess took my hand. She guided me out of there, up and into the light, and we didn’t look back even once. It was over. We no longer needed to see.
It’ll be okay, I told myself. As long as we can get upstairs and out of the house before I count to ten, everything will be okay.
Ichi, ni, san, shi, go…
IS IT TIME?
Two months have passed. I still have bad dreams.
We got out of there alive, but it doesn’t feel anything like a victory.
The weather is bad; the news reports say that big storms are coming, ones like we haven’t seen for a generation. But even the wind and rain and snow cannot wash away all the dirty memories of that night in Katherine Moffat’s cellar.
Jess is lucky. She was in some kind of daze throughout the entire ordeal. She didn’t come out of it until we got back home, far away from the carnage. I speak to her of that night sometimes, and a blank look crosses her face. She recalls children singing, a strange and beautiful light approaching her…but, thankfully, nothing more. I prefer it this way. She can do without those kinds of nightmares. The ones she suffers every night already are more than enough.
Holly is still in a coma. She might come out of it tomorrow, or she might not ever wake up again. Nobody knows. All they can do is maintain her condition. Soon they’ll start asking me questions about turning off the life-support machine.
I still live in the same house with Jess. We’ve made the landlord an offer, and he’s thinking of selling us the place. We adopted two cats from the rescue shelter. Jess wanted to name them Magic One and Magic Two, but I talked her out of it. Instead, we’ve called them Faith and Duty.
My hands are crippled. I lost my job on the warehouse floor, but Evans has given me a new position in the back office, where I get to sit at a computer all day logging in data. It’s the same job Carole used to do. My hands still hurt, but I can type, and I can still use my brain. There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand and I managed to break nearly all of them. I can no longer make a fist, but that’s okay. I think I’ve run out of things to fight against.
I told the police everything I could remember, but I left out the things I’m unable to understand. They didn’t need to know about things like bright-dark, the Radiant Children, and a reanimated corpse with a pumpkin for a head. They’re still looking for Benjamin Kyle; they think he fled the scene, and I’ve told them nothing to contradict that. They cleaned away the remains of Katherine Moffat and burnt them. As far as I know, Pru’s body was incinerated, too. Only ashes remain, but they, too, have drifted away by now, blown on the winds to scatter like pollen, and then returned to earth: ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Carole, poor Carole, who tried to warn me, was apparently dead the whole time. Kyle must have killed her as soon as he got her down into that cellar, getting busy one last time before I found them there.
Despite—or maybe because of—my injuries, my martial-arts training has now taken on a more spiritual aspect. I train every day with Ted Hannah at his dojo, going ever deeper into the art. I’ve never felt more content about who I am, what I’ve done, and how I can improve myself. I still wake up sweating and thinking about the man Holly and I murdered, but now I can cope with my guilt. I can accept that I have a penance to pay and that one day I shall be called upon to settle the debt.
Sometimes I allow myself to think we’ll make it, the three of us. That Holly will wake up, our grim secret will pull us back together as a couple, and our daughter will overcome her own traumas—the ones we have gifted her, as all good parents somehow manage to do to their children.
The rest of the time, all I can do is hope, because, really, that’s all any of us can cling to as we hurtle through this life at the velocity of bullets from a gun. But at least now I have something to hope for, and something to believe in…and that’s good, because something is always better than nothing.
It is. It really is.
Isn’t it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary McMahon is the critically acclaimed author of several novels, novellas and short stories. His latest book releases are the short apocalyptic novel The End, a story collection titled Where You Live, and the DarkFuse novellas Nightsiders and Reaping the Dark. His award-winning short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes.
Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.
Visit his website at www.garymcmahon.com.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, publishe
d as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
Table of Contents
THE BONES OF You
Connect With Us
Other Books by Author
It Is Time
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART TWO
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
Is It Time?
About the Author
About the Publisher